


a locked heart’s door

by resentfully



Category: EVERGLOW (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Canon Compliant, Emotional Homewrecking, F/F, Tension at the Breakfast(less) Table, Unequally Requited Feelings, Unrequited Crush, Weird Triangulation Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:40:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22155670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resentfully/pseuds/resentfully
Summary: It’s easy to love beautiful things.
Relationships: Heo Yoorim | Aisha/Kim Sihyeon, Heo Yoorim | Aisha/Wang Yiren, Kim Sihyeon/Wang Yiren
Comments: 17
Kudos: 60
Collections: BBBFest Debut Round: The Bittersweet Option, Haggly Holidays!





	a locked heart’s door

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cherrygarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherrygarden/gifts).



> hello noura... happy holidays :^) it was heaps of fun working with your prompts and likes <3 love you!!
> 
> here are the bbbfest squares this fic hits: everyone saying 'i love you' but not quite in the way you'd like, bff roleplay becomes real, resenting others for their emotional vulnerability, lying about your ideal type, body is your worth, post performance horniness
> 
> canon timeline very very loose so please don't pay too much attention to that, but this is set sometime roughly in the near future. enjoy!!

Clearly it’s a situational thing, at the start. Proximity is addictive. For a long time Yiren stuck to Sihyeon’s side like a second shadow, too uncertain of her place in an environment she could barely communicate with, and Sihyeon tried her hardest to be kind to her. And it’s not like Sihyeon did anything to actively discourage things once she started noticing. It’s easy to love beautiful things, and beauty is their profession, after all.

So she let Yiren hang off her, tuck herself into her side, interlace their fingers and bring their joined hands up to the light. Back then, Yiren couldn’t speak to Serim and Eunji, and Yoorim hadn’t joined the company yet. Schoolgirl infatuation for a girl who’d dropped out of school; Sihyeon was flattered by the attention. It was harmless enough. Sometime between the end of the show and their debut Yiren had gotten over it, but the undercurrent is still there, the helpless softness in the way Yiren smiles at her. Yoorim might be Yiren’s favourite, now, but Sihyeon was Yiren's first choice first. 

She gets why, too. Some things, you have to live through them to understand. All trainees have those long harsh unseen hours in common, but the maxed-out intensity of a survival show crams years worth of it into the span of months, light through a magnifying glass transforming itself into heat, capacity for harm, though any idol trainee worth her salt should already associate light with danger. Stage lights, camera bulb flashes, makeup counters, each demanding exposure, that carefulness of self like a one-way mirror, except it’s difficult to say for sure which side of the glass she’s on.

Humming the hook of their new single, still untitled, under her breath, Sihyeon rearranges her limbs, tilts her head. _A bit more to the left,_ calls the photography director, and Sihyeon complies. _Good, just like that._ Flash. Sihyeon slides to the ground, spreading her chiffon skirts around her legs, and pushes the shining waterfall of her hair over her shoulder. Flash. Under the studio lights in her heavy sequined jacket, she’s starting to get uncomfortably warm, but she presses a limpid smile to her face and doesn’t allow her gaze to waver. Flash.

And that’s her part of the photobook done. As she’s walking off the set she shucks off the jacket, draping it carefully over the back of a chair at the makeup station; it’s Yves Saint Laurent and probably cost enough to pay off a good chunk of her training debt. Like everything else she’s wearing it came out of the company closet. An investment for an investment. Best to handle with care.

Yiren hands her a small plastic bottle of water, dewed with condensation. “For you, unnie,” she says, sparkly as the rhinestoned Chanel brooch at her collar.

“Thanks,” Sihyeon says. She reaches out to muss Yiren’s styled hair and Yiren ducks out of the way, yelping. "Did you see where I put my book?"

"I don't think you brought it today?"

"Damn." Now she has no way to pass the time while the others finish shooting. She eyes the chairs at the makeup station. Maybe if she pushed them together she could take a nap?

Sihyeon lifts her hair out of the way and sets the bottle to the back of her neck, exaggerating a flinch from the shock of the chill. Yiren's eyes go wide, then curve up in delight. She's easy to amuse, their youngest. Yiren is remarkably transparent, because she's never really needed to be anything else. When Sihyeon frames it in those terms it's easier to pity her. 

Yiren’s eyes drift towards the set, and Sihyeon follows the line of her gaze to Yoorim in the centre. Yoorim breezes through her shots, that dark and nameless grace to the long lines of her body. Every pose liquid, effortless. If they can build enough momentum with this comeback, if they can move out of the midtier limbo between rookies and seniors without wilting into destitution and obscurity, she’ll be the one CFs come knocking at Yuehua’s door for.

Sihyeon expects envy, and is cautiously pleased when none rises; it's just not productive to have that sort of thing in the air when their futures are all tied together for the duration of their contracts. She isn't necessarily a practical girl by nature, but she knows how to adapt. All things must, in the end, change, in order to survive. She hadn't wanted to, so full of faith in herself. Then she learned better.

Instead she lowers the bottle and looks at Yoorim, consideringly. It’s like balancing an equation: if Yiren needed Sihyeon then, and Yiren loves Yoorim now, then what should Sihyeon do on the other side?

Easy to love beautiful things. Easier still to want them.

So Sihyeon makes a challenge out of it. She doesn’t consider herself a spiteful person; isn’t sure what exactly is driving her to do this, fingertips light on Yoorim’s upper thigh, palm pressed to the small of Yoorim’s back, thumb brushing over Yoorim’s knuckles. To prove she can, maybe. To make a point. To teach a lesson. If you don’t act then you get nothing. In a way, she’s still looking out for Yiren. _Come on, you have to reach out and take what you want. Girls like us, we know nothing comes free, we lived it._ Hearts in their throats watching their rankings slide inexorably lower and lower, the finality of gravity catching up to them. 

“My ideal type?” Sihyeon says, leaning over Jiwon’s shoulder and pretending to read off the comments scrolling down her iPad. “Let’s see… taller than me, and beautiful eyes…” She glances, fake-covertly, at Yoorim, seated on the other end of the table. “If only Aisha could be a boy!”

Yoorim’s hands fly to her mouth. Despite the shyness of the expression, her violet contacts make her gaze even more unsettlingly intense than usual. “That’s okay, unnie, I can still be your boyfriend,” she says brightly. 

“Actually, our Aisha’s special talent is making herself look small, even next to Yiren,” Sihyeon says to the phone camera, laughing. “She just has this way of disappearing into you. Isn’t that right?”

From there the conversation derails into another round of Yoorim loudly insisting she isn’t 180 centimetres tall, despite being respectably comparable in height to her The Show co-MC, NCT’s Lucas, whose height Sihyeon has searched up and knows to be officially recorded as 183, probably including insoles. Sihyeon props her chin up against the heel of her palm and keeps her eyes on Yoorim, rewarded by the gradually rising colour in Yoorim’s cheeks.

“Looking to steal Yiren’s best friend, unnie?” comes Eunji’s brusque voice, after they’ve said their goodbyes and switched the VLive app off and dispersed out again into the far reaches of the Yuehua company building.

Sihyeon slings an arm around Eunji’s shoulders, pulling her down beside her. Under the contact, Eunji tenses, then visibly makes an effort to relax. More than a year in and Eunji still can’t disguise the way she cringes away from physicality, uncomfortable with showing her heart to the point of caricature, though it’s not like they don’t all do that, take some part of themselves and magnify it and hope it doesn’t burn away under the light. Trick of the trade.

She still remembers the time before their first music show win when they’d gotten backstage after their performance and Eunji broke down instantly into an unrecognisable sobbing mess. Afterwards they could say it was accumulated pressure, or even gratitude. But Sihyeon’d seen the raw terror in Eunji’s eyes and clocked it for what it was: fear that she hadn’t met her own exacting standards, hadn’t held on tightly enough to the lovely dream. Again, the way she hadn’t since stepping out of the pyramid room in the Produce set that no longer held any space for her, Sihyeon could feel in her teeth just how shaky their claim to the stage was, if they weren’t loved. So they had to be beautiful.

Sihyeon flew to Eunji’s side before anyone else could react, shielding her from the gaze of any stray cameras. Her arms went around Eunji like a noose. “Hold it together, Han Mya,” she ordered, low and urgent by Eunji’s ear, “just a little longer, just until we’re on the other side of it, then you can cry. Do you understand? Just a little longer.”

Just a little longer in the practice rooms. Just a little longer until the next portion-controlled meal of poached skinless chicken and steamed vegetables, Sihyeon picking the carrots and red cabbage out of her plate for Yiren, a habit she'd formed during Produce 48. Just a little longer stitching themselves into the glittering lights as if they’d been part of them from the start, so they'd bleed if separated. Day by day, year by year, and then they would find themselves on the other side of it. _Until we’re eighty-five,_ Sihyeon had said once, at Yiren’s birthday broadcast, and the others had protested, but what Sihyeon meant anyway was that by then they would long be dead in the public eye, which was the only death that mattered.

In the circle of Sihyeon’s arms, the tears stopped. Eunji understood. Sihyeon knew she would. Eunji's stubborn, but the stage changes you, even if you won’t change for it. And there is no girl in the world more practical than Eunji.

“Of course not,” Sihyeon says lightly. “Those two, they’re joined at the hip. Who could break them apart?”

Six in the morning finds them seated in various stages of consciousness at the dining table sans the dining, because promotions are breathing down their necks and all of them are on miserable diets they’re more or less complying with. Nobody speaks. Yoorim’s newly lacquered nails click against her phone screen, the loudest noise in the room. Yesterday Sihyeon knelt on the carpeted floor of Yoorim and Serim’s shared dorm room, Yoorim’s fingertips draped over the edge of Sihyeon’s hand, and carefully applied tiny iridescent gems to Yoorim’s nails. Some of her finest work yet.

Jiwon clears her throat. “Manager-unnie’s just stuck in traffic, she’ll be here in ten minutes.”

Serim hums in acknowledgement, clearly fighting the downward droop of her eyelids. Morosely, Yiren swills the last few drops of her glass of water around the base, then stands up, her chair scraping unpleasantly against the tiled floor.

As Yiren passes her, Sihyeon reaches out to touch her elbow. “Can you get me some water too? Please?” Sihyeon asks.

“Okay,” Yiren says.

Silence again. Serim’s lost the battle against her eyelids and it looks like she’s fallen back asleep sitting upright. None of them have the heart to rouse her. The chair Yiren’s just vacated creates a gap in the ring around the table, right between Sihyeon and Yoorim. Sihyeon slings a leg over the seat of the chair, then transfers her weight altogether into Yiren's chair, taking advantage of the movement to shift closer to Yoorim. Yoorim glances up from her phone in surprise. Sihyeon wiggles her fingers in a greeting wave.

When Yiren returns it’s easy to gauge the moment she notices the shuffled seating arrangement, surprise and something Sihyeon isn’t sure how to name splashed over her expression. She watches Yiren’s fingers pale around the circumference of the glasses in her grip. For a moment she thinks Yiren is going to say something, some outburst the way she’d only just barely been joking the time Serim went for Yoorim on VLive, but all Yiren does is set one of glasses down on the table, by Sihyeon’s hand. The circle of water inside trembles, then stills.

“Thanks,” Sihyeon says. She smiles at Yiren, letting it touch the corners of her eyes. Yiren’s answering smile comes almost reflexively, startled out of her. 

She'd wanted the reassurance of that dependable reaction but Sihyeon still finds disappointment pearling in her throat like she’s swallowed a statement necklace. _Come on_ , she thinks, settling back against her chair. Beneath the table her knee presses against Yoorim’s. _Harden that heart of yours. Haven’t you learned anything? Didn’t I teach you well?_

In elementary school some of Sihyeon's classmates took magnifying glasses outside during summer, hunting for ants they could sizzle to a crisp on the pavement. She'd yelled at them when she found them, but the cruelty had already been done; she could not undo it, only contend with it. So: the ant, the light, the glass, the hand wielding it. If those are the only options, then—

Getting Yoorim into her bed is, in the end, almost disappointingly easy. In the van shuttling them back to the dorms, Sihyeon drops into the seat beside Yoorim before Yiren can claim the spot. With the afterimage of the stage lights still swallowing up her vision Sihyeon wraps her hand around the back of Yoorim's neck and just like that Yoorim goes pliant. She allows herself to be steered into Sihyeon's room, allows herself to be kissed until she's gasping.

“I’m not stepping on anything between you and Yiren, am I?” Sihyeon asks, running her fingers along Yoorim’s collarbone, the skin there shimmery with the cream highlight a stylist had swiped along it just before they went onstage. The insistent buzz Sihyeon thinks of as performance sickness skittering just under her skin, like intoxication, or fever.

Yoorim flushes, but shakes her head. “We aren’t,” she says, and of course the collective refers to her and Yiren, “we aren’t—I thought… but there’s nothing."

Soon she's spread out underneath Sihyeon, so eager to be taken apart. That onstage shamelessness settling over her, like this too is a performance. Sihyeon skims a hand over the heave of Yoorim’s ribcage and nudges Yoorim's knees apart.

Yoorim comes twice with Sihyeon’s head between her thighs, eyes glassy, legs liquid. Stifling sounds against her fist, her other hand clutching white-knuckled at the sheets. Then Sihyeon brings the hand at Yoorim's mouth down by the wrist, guiding it around the back of Yoorim's upper thigh so she's holding herself open for Sihyeon. She slides two fingers into Yoorim, so wet, hardly any resistance, the pad of her thumb circling Yoorim's clit. She kisses Yoorim’s navel and sucks a mark into the crease of her hip and curls her fingers. Yoorim shakes apart for the third time, crying out sharply, a shapeless noise. The arch of her back off the bed something choreographed. She’s beautiful like this. Easy to see why Yiren loves her. Easy to love Yiren, too, now that Sihyeon understands. 

Afterwards, Yoorim falls asleep almost immediately, face just as lovely slack with sleep as it is staring into a camera or smiling down at Yiren or drawn tight as Sihyeon disassembles her. Sihyeon kisses the bare tip of Yoorim’s shoulder, hears her sigh. She’d love to follow Yoorim into unconsciousness but her heartbeat won’t slow, like she’s still coming down hard from the stage, that diamond edge of adrenalin filing her thoughts into finely pointed tips. Aim and fire, into the same mundane memory, this one years old.

In the months leading up to filming the show, the three of them—Yena and Yiren and Sihyeon—had been assigned to the same room to bolster their connection via prolonged exposure therapy, so they could sell their onscreen chemistry better, when it came time. One night Yena had been taking her overlong turn in the shower. The clatter of water against tile cut off. Into the sudden absence of sound came a hesitant voice: 

“Unnie,” Yiren whispered, from the lower bunk. At this point her Korean still came haltingly; she alternated between deliberating over every syllable choice and rushing through her sentences as though speed could mask her lack of fluency. That meant that whenever she spoke to Sihyeon in Korean instead of English it was a conscious choice and one that Sihyeon paid attention to, though she couldn’t be sure of its exact significance. “Do you think—they’ll like us?” 

Sihyeon winced. It felt close to profane, saying it out loud. But she’d never shied away from plain truths before and she wouldn’t start now. “Of course they will,” she said, soothing. “Who wouldn’t fall for your cute fairy charms?”

“Sihyeon-unnie, I want to debut with you,” Yiren said. Such a surety in her voice, despite the fumbled phrasing. On the other side of the bathroom door, the muted drone of a hairdryer on the lowest setting, as unobtrusive as a highly obtrusive noise could be, started up. Sihyeon held her breath like a full glass of water. “Let’s work hard to debut together.”

It’d struck Sihyeon out of nowhere, then. The responsibility of holding another person’s faith in her hands. She hadn’t understood until that semiquiet moment in the dark, imagining Yiren’s wide eyes, Yiren’s hands clutching the covers, separated from Sihyeon’s field of vision but still within her space. Like it or not, they were each other’s people now. She thought, _God, I am absolutely not equipped to be anybody’s first love._ She said, “We will.”

**Author's Note:**

> feel free to let me know what you thought in the comments!!


End file.
